Travis Rowley: Liberalism’s Bedrock of Lies

Sadly, it was highly predictable. Despite the unfortunate fallout from other recent racial episodes – most notably the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and the Duke Lacrosse Case – the likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the New Black Panther Party, and the mainstream media just couldn’t help themselves from injudiciously prosecuting the Trayvon Martin tragedy.

Over the years it has become glaringly obvious that truth and due process are acceptable casualties to the Left, especially when it comes to keeping minorities loyal to their race-hustling masters. Nothing was going to get in the way of this opportunity to further cripple the black community by exasperating sentiments of racial paranoia and solidifying the psyche of victimhood.

And no amount of past lessons could dissuade the Left from exploiting another opportunity to keep the country divided on racial terms, and to confirm the liberal worldview – that is, that white people rise in the morning for the sole purpose of finding new ways to stick it to African-Americans.

Liberalism Is a Lie

Fortunately, the Left’s insistence on rushing to judgment is easily explained by a simple observation: Liberalism is a lie. And it’s a lie that needs to be continuously buttressed by more and more lies.

While the public is meant to believe that righteous indignation is what prompted the progressives, in reality left-wing activists jumped all over Trayvon Martin’s death for the same reason they impulsively politicized the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords – to authorize a falsehood.

In the case of Giffords, liberals pounced on the prospect of upholding their claim that Tea Party Republicans had been creating a political atmosphere that would ultimately lead to violence. Within hours of the massacre, the internet and the airwaves were swarmed by liberals who had been itching to confirm their false accusation.

And in the case of Trayvon Martin, liberals simply saw it as another chance to substantiate their longstanding contention that America remains a racist nation, and that big-government solutions are needed to correct the world we live in.

The Hunt for Hatred

To explain the lack of overt bigotry that is actually experienced in America, liberals have busied themselves over the years by crafting inane theories of “institutional racism” that have helped to sustain their most cherished political asset – the widespread presumption of minorities’ victim status.

But liberals have never abandoned their desperate search for outright episodes of hate – or any events that they can possibly portray as such.

In fact, liberals crave examples of bigotry so much that they have become famous for entirely manufacturing them.

Following in the tradition of the infamous Tawana Brawley case, in 2004 Claremont McKenna College professor Kerri Dunn – a vocal campus activist – reported to authorities that she discovered racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic epithets written on her car. In addition to the terms “kike,” “nigger lover,” and “whore” being spray-painted on her 1992 Honda Civic, Dunn’s tires were found to be slashed and her car windows smashed in. However, among other suspicious details concerning the case, two witnesses told investigators that “they saw Dunn drive her car – adorned with the offending graffiti – into a parking lot and smash the car’s windows and slash the tires herself.” After calling Dunn a “bald-faced liar,” a judge sentenced Dunn to one year in prison for committing insurance fraud and for filing a false police report.

Dunn is hardly an isolated nut. She’s a common liberal activist. As of 2005, the Los Angeles Times alone had “reported on more than 20 suspected or confirmed hate crime hoaxes on college campuses since 1997.”

While normal people are saddened by acts of cruelty, liberals actually enjoy them. They revel in them. For liberals, this is game-time. This is why they’re here.

I witnessed this progressive psychosis for the first time at one of the state’s most liberal institutions – Brown University. At Brown, dozens of student activist groups flatly state their condition of victimhood within their own self-descriptions, claiming that Brown’s campus is fraught with bigotry and fails to provide a “safe space” for gays, women, and minorities.

These declarations are absurd on their face. It would be more credible for a clown to say he felt uncomfortable at the circus than for gays, women, and minorities to say they feel threatened on Brown’s lopsidedly liberal campus.

Nevertheless, these are the presumptions and pronouncements that ground campus liberals into the activist lifestyle, and place them in politically correct positions of authority.

And liberals simply can’t abide a situation in which their very roots of power are suspected to have been falsified.

As a result, Brown activists can frequently be found contorting campus incidents – fights, arrests, etc – into something that they’re not. During my time as an undergraduate at Brown, several episodes would result in unjust expulsions from the University for students who just happened to be in the path of political activists on a quest not to correct injustices, but to simply certify their activist existence.

It’s not just that campus liberals are willing to lie. It’s that liberalism itself is a lie – built upon a million falsehoods that ultimately result in actual injustices. On a clumsy course to validate their lifestyles of protest, left-wing activists have stripped students of Ivy League opportunity, they’ve tarnished the lives and reputations of Duke student-athletes, and threatened the career of a distinguished Cambridge police officer.

And in regards to the Trayvon Martin controversy, we’ve already witnessed an elderly couple driven from their home after Spike Lee posted the wrong address for George Zimmerman on his Twitter account after the Black Panthers placed a large bounty on Zimmerman’s head. Lee “shared the erroneous address with his 248,000 followers.” Soon after, “several hostile tweets followed that suggested someone go to Zimmerman's house and seek revenge for Martin's death.”

Liberals don’t care. Past mistakes are no reason to hesitate, or to allow cooler heads to prevail. They’ll burn down all of civilization if an opportunity presents itself to spread their simple-minded perspective –that the world is divided into two groups, oppressors and victims.

Liberals never graduate or mature past the phase of college liberalism. Any liberal who actually does allow himself to develop beyond adolescent politics almost invariably winds up referring to himself as a conservative.

Trayvon Martin

George Zimmerman may very well be guilty of murder – even a heinous crime motivated by racial prejudice. But Zimmerman may also be innocent, and on his way to becoming the next victim of the Left’s ongoing crusade to mold the American mind.

Liberals simply couldn’t afford to let justice run its course. They’re too invested in the widespread public perception of all racial episodes. Their vital premise is that racism is rampant. And this notion must be protected. All of the power and institutions that have sprung up from 20th century liberalism stand to crumble if liberalism’s bedrock of lies is finally allowed to catch up with it.

Travis Rowley (TravisRowley.com) is chairman of the RI Young Republicans and a consultant for the Barry Hinckley Campaign for US Senate.

If you valued this article, please LIKE GoLocalProv.com on Facebook by clicking HERE.